Most athletic activities require the participants to respond rapidly to changes in their environment. For instance, they must constantly reevaluate their course of action depending upon their own velocity and position and that of a ball, opposing players, and teammates. However in training, and especially in solo training, the environment tends to be largely static. In the game known as soccer in the U.S.A., and football elsewhere, a common training drill consists of a player dribbling a ball around a series of cones or other similar markers. Such variation as exists consists of predetermined decisions such as to alternate between passing on the left on one cone and on the right on the next. Effectively such training exists within an invariant environmental state.
The disadvantage of such a drill is that it does not train athletes to constantly observe, analyze, and react, as they must in a real game. The present invention allows the introduction of transitions between multiple environmental states, such transitions being either strictly periodic or randomly varying in frequency, enabling in training situations a better simulation of the timing and thought processes of the game in question. The invention also allows new types of games to be created and played which incorporate the varying states expressed by the device into the play of the game. The invention accomplishes these goals by maintaining a time varying internal state which is transmitted to athletes, typically via a visual method such as colored lights, so that the athletes may interpret these signals as a change in the training or game environment. In the soccer training drill the invention would replace the traditional practice cone and would indicate to the player the manner in which the ball should be passed around the obstacle.
The intentional introduction of transitions between multiple contest states is common in arcade and video games and other electronic entertainment but there is little precedent for this in athletics. The only common examples occur at or before the actual contest: the opening toss of a coin before a game or the drop of the flag in an automobile race. In music the periodic signal from a metronome is often used and there may be instances where the signal from such a metronome has been used to aid athletes synchronize their movements to music. That differs from the utility of the present invention, which is not synchronization, but the presentation of varying training or game states to the athlete.
The following U.S. patents disclose concepts that bear some relation to the present invention. However, none of the cited prior art discloses an invention having the versatility or utility of the present invention.
Stuler U.S. Pat. No. 3,629,600 discloses a battery powered traffic light controller. This and other traffic controllers differ markedly from the device of the current patent application. Such controllers transition between their 3 states (green,yellow,red) in a single fixed order. Additionally, these transitions are either triggered by external sensors or occur at fixed time intervals. The present invention does not use external sensors to trigger state transitions. Instead, a large repertoire of randomly varying state transitions useful in athletic training are provided. The traffic controllers would be predictable and useless for injecting variation into athletic training. Conversely, the device of the present patent, when configured appropriately for athletic training, would lead to havoc if utilized as a traffic controller.
Ramsey U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,340 discloses an athletic training device which is utilized for pacing. Its function is the antithesis of that of the device of the present patent application. The pacing device produces a certainty. It tells the athlete exactly where to be at a given time and even goes so far as to provide a correction signal when the athlete is too far ahead or behind. The present device produces an uncertainty. Its purpose is to present a signal which is variable and unpredictable. Moreover, the feedback circuit of Ramsey's device requires a measurement of the athlete's position. No such measurement is required or supported by the present invention.
Karrenberg U.S. Pat. No. 4,949,320 and Heywood et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,789,402 disclose athletic interval training devices. These devices indicate to the athlete a period for each of several athletic activities, typically a repeating run/walk/rest cycle. These devices are essentially modified clocks, they provide the athlete with a fixed and utterly predictable series of changes in the athletic environment. The present device produces an uncertainty—the athlete cannot predict, except statistically, what the environmental state signaled by the device will be at some future time. Both the cited devices and the present device allow the athlete to set the mean time in each state. However, the present device will only asymptotically approach that mean time over a long period and will have a large variance in the duration of each state. Conversely, the cited devices will have no variance (within the accuracy of the implementation) in the duration of each state. This is consistent with the intended uses. The cited devices are long term pacing devices, indicating to the athlete a particular exertion level to maintain for several minutes. The present device instead attempts to mimic the unpredictable and often rapid changes that occur in athletic events.
Miley U.S. Pat. No. 5,921,890 discloses yet another athletic pacing device, this one being optimized for use in swimming. As is true for the pacing devices disclosed above, it is designed to produce a certainty, in this case it emits a periodic signal to which the athlete attempts to synchronize swimming strokes. The utility of the present device is quite different, it is intended to signal unpredictable changes in the athletic environment. The sorts of unpredictable state changes provided by the present device are not appropriate for this type of pacing training. The present device would be better employed aquatically in the training of water polo players, who could be signaled to swim in various directions, for various periods of time, in an unpredictable manner.
Goldfarb et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,933,354 discloses a martial arts amusement device in which a light at one of ten positions on a picture of a combatant is lit. When a player strikes that position the light turns off, the player's score is incremented, and the game lights another region on the simulated combatant. The lights are selected from a pattern sufficiently complex to appear in random order to the player. This is a one or two player game. This invention is primarily a game rather than a serious athletic training device and it is described in very narrow terms without any general application to other types of athletic training or contests. This invention requires constant input from the player—the game will lock in any device state where a lamp is lit unless the player strikes the lit part of the display to allow it to transition to the next state. The designers recognized that a detector failure would render the game inoperable and provided a failsafe mechanism to transition should that occur—but such a transition is not a normal operating mode of the invention. In comparison, the invention of the present patent application, as it might be implemented for martial arts practice, would have lit one or more lamps for short periods of varying duration during which a lit lamp would have been a target for the athlete. The device would then have transitioned to another device state whether or not the athlete succeeded in striking the target(s). An alternative embodiment, which could be used with existing training dummies, would dispense with the lamps entirely and instead announce the targets through a speaker.
Elstein et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,702,475 disclose a sports technique and reaction training system in which a particular movement pattern is to be executed by the participant in a given amount of time in response to a start signal that determines which of several such patterns is to be executed. This invention requires that the participant return to a base position to trigger another training cycle—so that the time required to complete the movement pattern may be measured. Moreover, the purpose of the invention is to train the participant to carry out a choreographed set of motions in minimal time. The present invention is very different. Some of the differences are: the position of the athlete with respect to the device is not fixed (there are no intrinsic start and stop positions); the device runs independently of the athlete's actions (other than setting it and turning it on, the athlete would not normally affect the state of the device); more than one device could be simultaneously employed in training or during a game by an athlete or athletes; and the utility of the invention is to provide state transitions in training to better simulate actual play, or in play, to provide more variety to the game, but not to improve the performance of a predetermined choreographed set of motions.
Other instances of the class of athletic measurement devices examined in detail in the preceding paragraph are disclosed in Alston et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,502,489, Mackovjak U.S. Pat. No. 5,897,457, Guillen U.S. Pat. No. 6,066,105, and Feiner et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,278,378 B1. These devices all differ from the present invention in requiring two trigger events: one to initiate a measurement and a second one to indicate its termination. The devices then report the performance in some manner. The present invention utilizes no triggers, does not measure performance in any way, and is used in an altogether different manner than any of these devices.
Eger U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,239 discloses a visual training device comprising a plurality of LEDs under microprocessor control arranged around a central hole that in some embodiments holds additional optics. The user looks through the hole and focuses at infinity while simultaneously viewing the LEDs in the peripheral vision as they are lit. To do so the user's eyes must necessarily be centered on the hole and offset back from the device at such a distance that the LEDs will appear in the correct visual region. Effectively this fixes the location of the user's head with respect to the device. This may be an exemplary device for training the eyes of athletes. However, a person standing in a fixed position and rolling her eyes is not engaged in an athletic endeavor, even if such training is of some utility later when she does participate in an athletic activity. These embodiments neither elicit nor allow significant bodily motion and consequently have no utility in athletic training. That this is an eye training device, rather than an athletic training device, is further emphasized by those implementations employing colored filters specifically to exercise different sets of retinal cells, which have different chromatic sensitivities.
Eger also discloses more active embodiments that are designed to measure reaction time and accuracy in response to the visual stimulus. As such, these have triggers and other features as described above for other similar measurement devices, and so differ in fundamental ways from the present invention.
Eger does not disclose in any embodiment or method the concept of changing the state of the athletic environment. Reactions, if any, are always targeted back to the device itself, and specifically to the signaling lamp, such action serving to confirm that the light's stimulus was perceived, and in some cases to measure the speed and accuracy of that response. This differs fundamentally from the present device which informs the athlete of a change in the training or game environment with the athlete's subsequent response being in that context, and being generally external to, and unrelated to, the presence of the device itself. For instance, in a baseball pitching exercise the present device might be located between the pitcher's mound and home plate and would indicate that the ball should be thrown to a particular base or to home plate, all of which are traditional targets in this athletic context. However, the present device would not itself become the target of the directed action. Similarly, replacing an inert cone with a cone shaped embodiment of the present device in a soccer dribbling drill would add variation to an otherwise static practice but it would not change the nature of the cone in that drill by converting it into a target.